Monday, 2 June 2008

The urban olympics

Everyone knows, of course, that the 2012 Olympics will be held in East London. The squatters were chucked out from the London Fields Lido to make room for the olympic sized swimming pool.

Running alongside London Fields are London Lane and Ellingfort Road, these two parallel streets, tightly filled with Victorian houses, are a punk Coronation Street, for they are populated by ex-squatters (sit it out for 12 years and the property becomes yours) and housing co-ops. Relationships are as complicated as a soap opera, people are in and out each others houses all day and night.

Invited for a Spanish style dinner, drinking as we digested, I discovered that London Lane have decided to rent out the whole street, preferably to a small country, for the duration of the Olympics.

O., a boney vampire drug-addled waif, will be the butler.

That'll open the eyes of the world to the true London.Brainstorming last night,while watching the punks drift by the window from the annual punx picnic held in London Fields, we became inspired about an alternative Olympics... the urban Olympics, to be held at the same time.

"Blue sky thinking!"

shouted S, the manager of the Marie Lloyd bar. These urban olympics would include competitions such as the 100 metre mugging, the snatch a handbag from an old lady hurdles (garden fences!), the rat stomping competition, the pit bull trials, etc...

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